Package delivery service companies, such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service (UPS), have begun to deploy technology to track packages from pick-up to delivery. A typical package tracking system encodes a tracking identifier onto packages, and the tracking identifier is scanned at various points within the package delivery system to produce package location information. As a package moves from point-to-point within the delivery system, the package location information is transmitted to a centralized tracking computer. Both the delivery service company and its customers can access the package location information in the centralized tracking computer to accurately pinpoint the location of a package within the delivery system.
While state-of-the-art package tracking systems prove quite useful in tracking the progress of a package through a package delivery system, most package tracking systems do not track information on the physical characteristics of the package, such as package dimensions and volume. The dimensional information is of great interest to the package delivery service company, since such information allows the company to efficiently allocate delivery resources within the package delivery system.
For example, planes usually reach their volume limit before they meet their weight limit. Thus, having early access to dimensional characteristics on each package shipped within the delivery system would enable a delivery service company to schedule a plane having a volume capacity closely matching the aggregate volume of the packages scheduled for a given route within the delivery system. Likewise, the dimensional information would also prove useful in efficiently allocating ground transportation resources, such as semi-trailers and delivery trucks.
In order to be most useful, the dimensional characteristics of a package should be entered into the package tracking system as early as possible, so that the delivery service company has adequate time to adjust delivery resources. Optimally, the dimensional information should be gathered and transmitted as soon as the delivery service company receives the package. Since small trucks making frequent stops at numerous remote locations pick up the majority of packages in the delivery system, there is a need to provide drivers of these small trucks, or other persons receiving packages into the delivery system, with a portable, inexpensive, accurate and rapid method of obtaining and transmitting package dimensional information to a centralized tracking computer.